Month: April 2023

Søren Kierkegaard

While we were searching for Kierkegaard’s grave, Em asked if I already knew what I’d write on my headstone. Her question caught me by surprise, its sincerity and intensity doubled by Em’s foggy green eyes. I didn’t have an answer and so spent the rest of the afternoon morbidly scanning gravestones for inspiration, seeing in each of them, a small reflection of my own mortality. When we finally got to Kierkegaard’s grave, it was unassuming, weathered by the elements. Under his name the words of Danish clergyman Brorson were carved: “There is but little time/then I shall have won/then all the strife/will instantly have vanished/then I can rest/in petal-strewn halls/and ceaselessly to my Jesus speak.”
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Though Kierkegaard was religious, he believed in the subjective truth of the divine, thus pitting him against a Christendom that was institutionalised and politicized. He was also depressed for most of his life, attributing this state to a Cartesian misalignment, “a suffering which must have its deeper basis in a misrelation between [his] mind and body.” The paradoxes of modern life did not stop him from publishing 38 completed works throughout his life, including the very influential Either/Or, a cornerstone of Western existentialism. Transcending the tyranny of binary, Kierkegaard seemed to suggest, entailed creating meaning as you pass through life: “If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it.” Choices are not inherently wrong or right but objective artefacts imbued with subjective truth. Ultimately, even if life can be understood backwards, it can only be lived forwards (“Livet må forstås baglæns, men må leves forlæns”).
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As we were leaving, we stumbled upon a pair of amorous lovers making out. I briefly wondered if their display of affection was amplified by their surroundings, if the absence of life had given a more pronounced present to the living and made them randy. I couldn’t figure out the answer to Em’s question in the end but I imagined it would be, if I choose to be buried, located either in marriage, or not.

Mid-Spring

Monday’s weather continued from the weekend’s, the sky forlorn, the rain speckled. After Gil and I parted ways at the Berlin Central Station, I was assailed by a revelation of the emotional fullness of the days, which had began Saturday night with Elgar’s elegaic Cello Concerto at the Philharmonie, later reiterated on screen in the movie, Tàr. With Elgar’s melancholic strings still percolating in my head, I slept fitfully, then woke to go to Hamburger Bahnhof for the abstract, but in my head at least, tortured figures of Christina Quarles’s paintings. I ventured deeper, into a separate exhibition on broken music, charting the history of experimentations and innovations in music for the past few decades. A free audioguide is passed to you, on which you can scan QR codes to listen to the sounds from various curated themes in the exhibition – minimal/maximal music, techno, artists’s labels. I was immediately drawn to John Giorgio, who founded the Dial-A-Poem telephone service at the height of the 60s counterculture movement where a random poem is selected for the caller, usually poems with leftist leanings – anti-Vietnam war, pro civil rights, anti-capitalist. Eventually, it got shut down by the FBI in the 70s, not an unusual act of censoring materials that did not fit the status quo. In the Suicide Sutra, inspired by Buddhist chants, Giorgio’s voice is overlaid several times, each phrase, an echo of the last: “you can’t remember, you can’t remember, where you are, where you are, you have forgotten, you have forgotten, who you are, who you are.” Returning to the Central Station, Elgar’s contemplative tune was acoustically superimposed onto Giorgio’s mournful poetry, along with the visceral visuality of Quarles’s paintings. The overall effect was heavy, not the lightness of being of love and sex and living in the moment, but the vague feeling that all of these things have happened to you before, in a past life or an alternate reality. I took that feeling to Beate Uwe, where I met Fiona for the first time, and danced my heart away.